A hot glove at home

‘Do we have a cookie sheet?” my husband asked on Sunday night. But the question was rhetorical, spoken into the air, and he clearly didn’t expect me to answer.

He pulled one out of the cabinet, carefully laid a tea towel over it, and arranged two baseball mitts face down. Each had been evenly basted in some kind of white foam.

He slid the pan into the oven and set the timer for 4 minutes.

“Now,” he said, rubbing his hands together with anticipation, “we wait.”

An hour before, he had arrived home from running errands, laden with bags and exuding the breathless determination that usually indicates he has a project in mind.

He whipped two packages out of the bag from the sporting goods store and showed them to me.

One was Glovolium, a lanolin treatment for baseball and softball gloves that made a certain amount of sense.

The other one, though, was called Hot Glove Heat Treatment. It promised to break in new and dried-out older gloves quickly by first coating and then baking them.

“I need to preheat the oven to 300 degrees,” he said.

“Are you serious?” I asked.

“I’m going to cook these two baseball gloves,” he answered. “To make them soft and supple.”

Evidently, the combination of the Yankees’ struggles in these final weeks of the baseball season and the grim outlook for the New York Jets’ upcoming football season had been too much for him.

He had finally slipped a cog.

“No, really,” he insisted, noting my skepticism. “I read all about it. All the pros do it.”

“Derek Jeter bakes his glove?” I asked skeptically.

“Why? You don’t think he cooks for himself?”

A few days before, our son, who recently moved to New York, had called, asking that we mail his glove to him. A baseball player for many years, he had decided to join a softball league in the city.

This simple request, which I naively thought involved a padded envelope and a trip to the post office, instead drove my husband to new culinary pursuits.

Fifteen intense years of exposure to baseball and softball, from Little League through college club ball, did teach me quite a few things. I’m well aware of some of the subtleties in athletic equipment.

I’ve washed the strange garments, like padded softball shorts and slide pads. I know how to identify the long, top-heavy bat called a fungo, used to hit fly balls for practice. I have refined a technique for fitting a mouth guard, which somehow has to be boiled and then molded over a child’s teeth without scalding her gums.

But baking sporting goods was a new one.

“Listen to these instructions,” my husband said, holding up the heat treatment and slipping his glasses off to read the back of the package.

“ ‘Foam on liberal amount of Hot Glove Treatment over the entire glove, including laces and between fingers. Rub into glove with hand or cloth till you have a uniform, white film all … ’ ”

My eyes were glazing over.

“ ‘Now place the glove on the covered cookie sheet …’ ” He looked at me sharply. “You’re not listening, are you?”

“I am, too,” I said, snapping back to attention. “I’m just wondering if I should make some stuffing.”

“That’s not funny. Listen to the best part: ‘After you put the glove on the cooking sheet and put it in the preheated oven….’” He held the package up again and kept reading, this time in a deep, ominous voice:

“ ‘Do not exceed 4 minutes. Leaving it longer may dry out the leather. Don’t leave the glove unattended while glove is being treated. We will not be responsible for burning the glove.’ ”

By now there was a gleam in his eyes. “Cooking is so much more fun when there’s danger involved.”